June 6, 1923 to June 21, 1943

Immediately following the Great Depression, the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee (MUC) established a thrift-garden program in Detroit. Between 1931 and 1932, the height of the program, the gardens supplied food and benefits for about 20,000 people. Experienced gardeners would create model gardens for thrift gardeners to follow, who were either welfare clients or those near the verge of dependency. ...

James Scott, a real estate investor and heir to his father’s fortune, left the city of Detroit $500,000 to build a structure in his honor that also included a life-size statue of himself. The city decided on a fountain on the southern tip of Belle Isle. A competition was held, with Professor Eugene Duquesne at the helm, to gather potential designs for the fountain. The goal was to make this fountain...

When James Scott died in 1910 and left half a million dollars to the city of Detroit in his will, controversy erupted amongst local citizens. Scott, who inherited most of his money from his father and earned even more still from shrewd real estate deals, bequeathed the money so that the city could build a beautiful fountain on Belle Isle. It became a major issue when it was revealed that his stipulation...

Born in 1891 in rural Alabama, Zora Neale Hurston spent her childhood in the first incorporated black town in the nation, Eatonville, Florida. Zora attended school in Eatonville until only 13 years old, when she traveled to New York City with a traveling theatre company. In the city that never sleeps, Zora would develop her creative mind and make her mark on history. Hurston seized the tremendous...

The Communist Party was infiltrating Birmingham, Alabama and the National Guard was beginning to worry. On October 19, 1932, Second Lieutenant Ralph Hurst wrote to his commanding officer Brigadier General J.C. Parsons about the “Communist Agitation” in Birmingham. The International Labor Defense had recently moved its Southern headquarters to Birmingham and there had been trouble ever since....

“Anyone wishing to get a real glimpse into negro life in Florida should not miss the performance to be given in Recreation Hall.” 1 This praise, given to the anthropologist, writer, poet, dancer and singer Zora Neale Hurston, came from R. W. France about her 1934 production of All De Live Long Day. Zora lived her life in an attempt to revitalize and find the truth...

The last lynching in Maryland state history took place on the night of October 18, 1933, when George Armwood was kidnapped from jail and lynched by a mob of white protestors in Princess Anne County. Armwood had been accused of assaulting an elderly white woman. Enraged, a mob refused to wait for Armwood to be tried. His murder was just one in a long list of lynchings perpetrated by whites against...

During the 1930s, Detroit’s Western Market was bustling with hundreds of farmers, buyers, and city dwellers. Trucks were arranged as close as possible and numbers of large baskets containing fresh produce lined the surrounding area. Young to middle-aged men tended to be the ones to sell the farmed products, ranging from apples to poultry. In the busy summer months, the men, both farmers and...

Four-thirty in the afternoon on July, 28, 1932, Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., was embalmed with tear gas. Herbert Hoover instructed General MacArthur to lead 600 troops from the 16th Brigade into the streets to diffuse the “Bonus Army” riots. The first riot resulted in the death of one Bonus Marcher killed by police gunfire. After catching wind of the incident, President...

Life was as normal as it could be during the hot summer of 1906 in Alabama. The poor were getting more poverty stricken while the rich struggled to maintain what they had. Virginia Foster Durr remembers, “on Saturday mornings, these families would come into Birmingham, walking, there was no paved...